Droppingthe chair on the porch,shedusts her hands on her thighs and looks up at the slope.Straight up the ridge.At my cabin.
Shedoesn’tknow my windows are dark. Shedoesn’tknowI’mthree feet away from the glass with a mug in my hand and a heart that has stopped doing what it should.
She doesn’t know men like me don’t get neighbors.
We get distance. And silence. People we love get hurt if we forget that.
She lifts a gloved hand and waves.
I don’t wave back.
I step away from the window like a man stepping back from a tripwire.
“No,”I say to the empty cabin.To the kettle. To the coffee. To Henry, four hundred miles awayatHavenridgeRanch. “No, no, no.”
The cabin makes its three sounds.
Then it makes a fourth: a soft, distant, unmistakable singing carried up the slope on the wind, the song of a woman whodoesn’tknow anybody is close enough to hear.
I can’t make out the song. It’s an old tune. Cheerful. The kind of tune a person hums while they sweep.
It slides under my skin likeit’slooking for a place to stay.
I close my eyesandpress my forehead against the cold pane.
Sure, I had a mission, butona deeper level,I came up here becauseit’squiet. Safe.
Being alone is the only way I know how to keep people safe.
The last time I forgotthat,someone paid the price.
I don’t go toward soft things anymore.
I don’t go toward trouble.
And that woman, laughing at a broken cabin likeit’ssomething worth loving, looks exactly like both.
And I tell myself the lie I knowI’mgoing to lose.
I tell myself I will not go down there.
Chapter 2
Tess
The truck door slams behind me, and the cabindoesn’tso much as flinch. A skiff of snow rests on the porch railing like spilled sugar. One of the porch boards has separated from the joist below and is swaying in the wind, in and out, like a sleeping dog’s ribs.
The cabin is worse than the photos.
The photosweren’tflattering. They showed a tilted porch, a door whose original purpose seems to have been“concept,”and a piece of plywoodthat’sdoing the work of three windows. I took those photos with me into the bathroom of a Denver hotel, sat on the closed toilet seat with the door locked, and stared at them for an hour.
The planhad been“flyout, look at the place, list it with Marcus, fly home Sunday.”My mother’s plan, generously rephrased. She even printed me an itinerary.
The photos were a love letter. Theysaid,“You can have me if you want me, but I’m a project.”
I’venever had anything in my life thataskedto be a project.
My family’s specialty was fixing me. Softening my edges. Tucking my brightness into more presentable shapes. Turning down the volume on a girl who came out of the womb humming. They corrected me so often and for so many years that by the time I was twenty-three, the woman in my mirror was a polite stranger I once met at a party and, somehow, joylessly, had been dating ever since.
